We, TheDevCouple team, celebrate open source by arranging a number of interactive conferences and meetups every year. Meetups like these are opportunities for developers to meet, interact and network with the speakers and other developers. With the month of October ongoing, it was time for the yearly Hacktoberfest meetup.

🎊 Hacktoberfest

Ahmad Awais started off the talk with Hacktoberfest 2019. It is the sixth annual Hacktoberfest, a month-long celebration of open-source software. This is the deal: You have to make a total of five Pull Requests. These contributions are open to everyone and can be done to any project on GitHub. Once you are done, you’ll receive a cool limited edition Hacktoberfest T-shirt and stickers.

📽 Hacktoberfest OneDevMinute

If you want to contribute to open source and participate in this Hacktoberfest, do NOT miss this #OneDevMinute by Ahmad Awais. You can improve an open-source project’s documentation, refactor code, or gift that projects a new logo design — just participate and celebrate open source this October.

🦈 Digital Ocean

After the Hacktoberfest session, Ahmad moved on to Digital Ocean. He shared why is it one of the most go-to cloud platforms for developers & teams. One can deploy, manage, and scale cloud applications faster and more efficiently with it. The audience had several queries about its differentiating features and Functions as a Service (FaaS) with Digital Ocean.

💯 Digital Ocean powers Hacktoberfest and is also a prime sponsor of this meetup.

💻 GraphQL

Next, was an introduction to GraphQL. Ahmad first shared why the concept of APIs was easier to understand but hard to explain. But he had a fun interpretation up his sleeve. Imagine you are ordering some food form a menu in a restaurant. There needs to be some link between the kitchen and your order. That link is API.

GraphQL is a language and a server-side runtime for building and querying APIs. It provides a complete description of your API. It enables you to get exactly what you asked for in the API query. Moreover, you can specify calls to multiple REST APIs in a single query which is pretty efficient.

🍯 JAMstack

Finally, Ahmad moved on to personal branding. While replying to “Why should we have a blog?”, he shared how blogging for 16 years has helped him in all kinds of ways. Ahmad demonstrated how JAMstack could help set up a blog on a domain of your name.

JAMstack is the combination of JavaScript, APIs, and prebuilt Markup to form a web development architecture. Here any front-end framework of JavaScript, say React, handles client-side functionality. While all the database and server-side tasks are carried out by reusable APIs. Finally, the markup is prebuilt at deploy time using a site generator such as Gatsby.

🙋‍♂️ Any Questions?

Ending the meetup was a good Q&A session. This was when more targeted discussions, sharing of ideas and opinions took place. Many attendees approached Ahmad to discuss their ideas, possibilities and how they can streamline them.

🍕 Refreshments & Swag

This was the fun part. Everyone got their hands on swag, stickers, cheat sheets and guides sent by our sponsors. A special thank you to DigitalOcean! To top it all, there was fresh pizza with drinks for everyone.

Maedah Batool is a WordPress Core Contributor, Technical Dev Manager and a part-time Journalist. She created a tech-training startup called FinkTanks where she has taught 1,000+ girls how to code with WordPress.